Pkchukiss - Reality Wine

2 weeks of running around in green uniform again; wish me luck!

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What’s more interesting than working, sleeping, eating, and then (work) again?

The answer: Reservist training!

Firstly, you get to force yourself to go running in the middle of the night, because you have been working from dawn to dusk, and have only enough time to work and re-fuel like a emotional machine. Yeah, I’m writing this at approximately 1.30am Singapore Time, and the work never seems to stop rolling in. It’s like a cement truck taking a dump that wouldn’t end.

It’s not that I’m drowning in assignments (though the in-camp training would probably push me into a state of utter desperation [yet again] after squandering 75% of my school holidays). Rather, it’s club matters that have been occupying my HMA (High Memory Area). I’ve been thinking about how to rejuvenate a one-year old school club that hasn’t been actively recruiting members to its ranks.

The lack of fresh blood means that when the current club management retires from active service, there’ll be barely any new people to take over the controls. That’s like running a ship aground right at the end of your watch; I’d really hate to pass on a shipwreck to the next generation, because it’s way too irresponsible a course of action.

In certain ways, I kind of wish that somebody would tell me what to do in order to set things right; because that’s what I’ve been doing these recent years. Teachers would tell me to complete an assignment, and I’ll complete it. In the army, I was told that I have to protect my country, and so I did.

Then came this opportunity for me to break out of being a perpetual reactionary puppet. This, coming after a long while of not having to think about what to do next, is refreshing yet a frightening thought at the same time. There are no paths set out for leaders — the trailblazers burn a path through the dense vegetation for the rest to follow. I’ve been following a path until now, and that path has ended here.

How now shall I burn a new path through the forest?

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Yesterday, a few of us went to Sim Lim Square to build a custom system for one of us. The system was going to be solely for rendering videos and post-processing pictures. Since it was going to be a white-box, which means that we could choose all the components that made up the system, the buyer picked the following:

• Gigabyte GA-EP45T-DS3R motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Quad 6600 2.4 GHz processor
• PowerColor HD 3870 x2 DDR4 graphics processing unit (GPU), also known as the graphic card
• 3 X 1 Terabyte (TB) hard disk (I forgot the brand)
• 2 X Kingston 2 Gigabyte (GB) (I think it was the DDR2-800) random access memory stick (RAM)

I took the opportunity to upgrade my notebook’s ram to 4GB. Unfortunately, it turns out that my laptop BIOS has been limited to use only 3GB, so I’m out of luck with the last 1GB. I can’t even install PAE extensions for the Ubuntu 8.04 Linux operating system on the computer, since it’s a lower-level part of the system that’s the limiting factor. I wasn’t totally out of luck though, because dual channel for the RAM started working properly again, because the 2 new pieces of RAM installed were very similar pieces (a crucial step in making sure that dual channel works properly).

The graphics card is a super-zhnged piece of monster, with pipes running around the body. The fan blade is an angry buzzer whining when the system first starts up. Or it could have been the exhaust fan at the casing’s rear. Or the processor fan. Wait, was it the air-intake cooler at the front of the case? When the assembled system ran, it was hard to tell, but I do know one thing for sure: it is going to be hell to have to sleep in the same room with the thing running video renders overnight.

Thankfully, it isn’t going to be a problem because the buyer is going to put it in an air-conditioned study area, so the noise bugbear isn’t going to be as bad.

A friend successfully installed a hacked Macintosh OS X operating system (commonly called the “Hackintosh“) onto the desktop, but for some unknown system, the graphics card would refuse to go into 3D accelerated mode. As we all know, it’s a humongous waste of money to spend $200 over dollars on a monster graphic card, only to use it without its touted features! So we spent the entire night over at the friend’s place to try and hack up a solution to the problem.

For me, since I’m not really into OS X and Macintoshes, I resorted to surfing the Internet while the other 2 of them tried to coax the thing to work.

At around 11pm, we ordered delivery from McDonalds. 45 minutes, a subtly disturbed looking delivery person knocked at the door with our meals. He would get to make the same trip half an hour later when my other friend placed his order after the delivery guy left, and return he did, a dark expression on his face, and my friend thought he felt a strong murderous intent when I suggested that we make another order an hour later.

The Mega McSpicy turned out to be the old discontinued McSpicy Double with an artificial price hike, and gave me a hellish toilet trip the next morning at 7am. It broke a record in terms of meal turn-around time, because my toilet trips usually come 8 hours after the meal.

At around 2am, I couldn’t stay awake any longer, so I laid down on the couch in the living room. In the quiet Boon Lay night, my laptop blared music from an Internet stream from the bedroom where my friend was busy trying to hack OS X, to the living room, where I knocked out, figuratively speaking.

It was like finally succumbing to a comfortable black hole in my eyes. No dreams though; somehow I’ve become unaware of my dreams. Either I was forgetting them when I wake up, or I was seriously too dead-beat to be able to remember them.

Thus ends the report on what I did on Friday. It was an unintentional sleep-over that resulted from an over-extended geek pilgrimage, which would have bored any normal person to death. Therefore, I want to congratulate you for having managed to finish reading this. Extra credits if you can understand half of what I typed in the first few paragraphs.

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These 2 weeks I have been concentrating my mind-blasts on 2 reports for my assignments. There’s a business operations management module that required us to identify problem areas facing a specific company, and another one about online gaming.

The trouble isn’t in finding things to write about. Singapore’s so hooked up on to the Internet that it’s easy to just open Firefox and search for the information on Google. The hard part comes right after you’ve gathered everything you wanted to write about. It doesn’t help that I’ve been over-trained by the JC system, and have a writing standard tighter than the school requires us to.

I fretted about using the appropriate words to convey the exact situation as I read in my sources. If anyone wants to blame my pickiness on something, try the hundreds of nuances that exists in the English language, which allows you to control the strength of your essay. It’s like making coffee that becomes expressos, or lattes (as well as the few hundred subtle variations in between).

I was quite satisfied with the fruits of my endless meddling, but I can’t help but notice that in the process of picking at nits in the reports, I had paid very little attention to the general scope of the essays. That’s something which can hurt a lot! Like a real General Paper essay, getting your little details right isn’t going to matter if the paper doesn’t answer the question asked in the project brief!

Also, I would have enjoyed the experience a whole lot better if I didn’t have other things to worry about simultaneously. A project for a programming module that’s worth 5 credit units is coming up. Deadline for the monster isn’t due for another month, if not for the fact that I have to go for my reservist that’s going to happen in December.

Two whole weeks of in-camp training is going to take away a lot of time from my school projects. The good news is that I won’t be missing a lot of school, since Mindef has kindly scheduled the obligation during the term break; but I can’t help but feel that this is another chore.

This blog post feels like a report of my situation in school, and I think it is a true reflection of my current state of mind right now. Now I’ve got to learn how to task-switch between report writing mode, and blogging mode.

To sleep now.

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Add “proxy.singnet.com.sg” on port “8080″ to your browser Internet connection settings. It must have been SingNet’s proxies going crazy again.

StarHub users need not worry. It’s normal for this website to load slowly for you; they don’t have enough international bandwidth to support grabbing pages speedily from the United States. Boo to them.

Singapore’s Internet infrastructure is way too “koyak” for companies to even consider setting up their websites here!

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I’ve been using the current bag for many years, and the thing is starting to fall apart bit by bit. First, the plastic bits of the clip that secures around the chest area broke off. Next, some of the strap looping plastic bits started breaking off. All in all, it was like holding a possession that’s on the verge of demise.

I think it is most probably my fault, because these bags aren’t designed to hold heavy loads like laptops, chargers, files that are bursting at its seams, and the few stray blood donation stress balls I’ve chucked in after the donation drives (and forgot to take out).

I peeked into the bottom of the bag, and saw a few receipts, dog-eared notes that came in odd sizes, pieces of Post-it, as well as an unidentifiable piece of black substance. Its suspicious appearance and absence of odour made it hard for me to jump to any conclusions, but it looks very likely to be decomposed piece of sweet. It doesn’t look or feel sticky, so it could simply be shedding from some poorly made stuff I shoved into my bag haphazardly many years ago.

Ah yes, my dirty little secret is laundered right over the Internet: I’ve been incubating secret experiments with black matter for years! It’s unfortunate that my bag is failing, so I need to find a new host for the flora of rubbish (and associated icky stuff) before I have to bring my school stuff in a Carefour supermarket plastic bag.

So, I’m in the market for a new bag. Does anyone have any suggestions where I can get a new host for my garbage that is:

• Ok-looking (I don’t need stylish)
• Easy to clean
• Holds a laptop, and lots of other stuff while remaining-
• -small enough
• Cheap

I’m not a brand-conscious person, so I assess a bag as if it were made by some nameless company. Of course, if said branded goods is cheap and good, I won’t hesitate to plonk down the cash on the spot! That said, I’m a guy (in case this is your first time reading this blog), so I don’t really qualify for the stuff sold in most blog shops (they’re generally ladies’ bags).

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There’re quite a few cool things I’d like to share with you:

Bloons Tower Defense 3:

There’s the first game, the second game, all within the genre of building static towers hurling projectiles to stop enemies from breaching the goal at the very end. Except that it’s less brutal when you’re popping ballons instead of rupturing some poor monster’s gut.

Now, the third game has just landed on Ninjakiwi, and I’ve already spent half a day popping ballons on 8 different maps — that’s the power of Flash games, my friend. You get curious right when you’re taking a break from working, and the next moment, you’re spending the rest of your productive time trying to beat the frustrating ballons on Hard.

Swings:

Now, most of us whom were born in the 80s and early 90s had a pretty good idea about what a swing was. You sat on the black rubber seat held together by only two long steel chains, and wriggled your body as you swung to-and-fro between kicking curious kids who came too close to your front, and farting at whomever’s pushing you at the rear. It was good clean fun until somebody got hurt, which was a rare occurence, of course.

You get bonus points if your swing chains were semi-rusted, and the support beams quivered dangerously whenever your neighbourhood elephant swung on it. Kudos to your bravery if you went near it at night when it sways purposefully with an eerie creak sound as it swings back and forth with nobody sitting on it.

That aside, I’ve always been curious to know if it is possible to swing an entire round around the crash bar. I never dared to push that hard, because I always got the feeling that I would slip off the seat and crash into the sand pit. Now, somebody has gone and done it.

Not totally awesome stuff, because he did it with two metal rods, instead of the metal chains like we have in Singapore. Nonetheless, it would have been physically impossible for any person to do the flip on a metal-chained swing without external assistance. You would need too much centralfugal force to do that!

YouTube Audio Commenting

It isn’t really something awesome in itself; but rather, the story behind it (or the coincidences) make it newsworthy. Read this Internet comic:

Now read this.

YouTube actually implemented it!

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Here’s the letter published in the Straits Times today:

MONDAY’S report, (’Girl’s death: Officer blogs about his guilt’), is disconcerting to the good image of the Singapore Police Force and perplexing to police retirees like myself.

When I was an active officer, we were constantly reminded that personal emotions and opinions should never cloud or affect the performance of any officer.

The only pertinent question that an arresting officer should ask himself is whether he was justified in arresting the suspect.

The older generation of police officers did not endure sleepless nights because we arrested a suspect, nor after being involved in shoot-outs with criminals, some of whom were sent to the gallows eventually.

I may sound callous, but the police officer’s blog is contrary to good order and discipline, which are part of the foundation of the police force. Musings and self-doubt demoralise other officers and, if allowed, may corrode the confidence and professionalism of the police force.

The force should not rule out instituting disciplinary action against such acts as ventilating one’s emotions in a blog. It already has sufficient avenues open for a distressed officer to seek professional help and counselling. Going public with one’s act of contrition isn’t one of them.

Lionel De Souza

Firstly, I do not begrudge his statement that personal emotions and opinions should not prevent a police officer from doing what’s right. I take special exception to De Souza’s assertion that the specific police officer’s blog contravenes good order and discipline.

Pray tell, sir: how does blogging affect one’s discipline? That one’s most pensive thoughts would cause other officers to be demoralised? And how does that cause the police force as a whole to have weakened confidence and professionalism?

A careful reading of the 5th paragraph displays clearly how this author is leading on premise after premise, building each assertion without proper justification of the basis of his claims.

De Souza, are you suggesting that a police officer has no right to express his own opinion and feelings on a personal website? How dare you deny them their right to freedom of speech? Aside from official secrets, which cannot be published as civil servants are bound by the Official Secrets Act, how dare you suggest punishing people for penning their thoughts down when they are off-duty?

If the morale and discipline of the local police force were that easily weakened by an honest posting of a person’s thoughts on the Internet as what De Souza has suggested, it implies that the police officers are not sufficiently trained to contain their human emotions while on the job. That is quite a daring insinuation about the quality of training our police force undergoes, so I hope that he will shed some light on why he believes this to be true.

Lionel concludes his letter with a conclusion: police officers aren’t allowed to show emotions of guilt even while they are off-duty. No siree. Emotions are for human beings, and you’re not allowed to be one.

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